Catherine McKenna has spent the better part of her adult life studying the history and people of Eastern Europe. After growing up in a small town in central Maine, she went off to Princeton University and promptly fell in love with all things Russian. It was the early 1990s, and the fall of the Soviet Union had opened up all sorts of new possibilities to study the eastern bloc—opportunities that had seemed unimaginable only a few years before. After completing her AB in Russian Literature, she headed to Russia, where she spent several years studying and teaching English, first in the provinces and then in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the late 1990s, as Russia became much less open and free, its interests turned to Eastern Europe, first to the new countries of the former Yugoslavia and then to Poland. In 2000, she returned to graduate school at Georgetown University to study the history and politics of Eastern Europe. Ten years later, after spending lots of time in Zagreb, Prague, Warsaw, and Cracow, and mastering Polish, she completed her Ph.D. in European History with a focus on early modern Poland-Lithuania. She spent the next five years teaching at Georgetown and other schools in the Washington, DC area. Three years ago, she decided to return to Maine to pursue other interests and to write a popular version of her academic work. She is now putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of this book, Liberty’s Double Edged Sword: The Rise and Fall of the Polish Republic. She lives in Yarmouth with her husband, teenage daughter, and one incredibly spoiled cat.